Social injustice is the crack in the Liberty Bell; as we stand united in solidarity with our brothers and sisters throughout the world in our wonderfully diverse human family, with our essential workers who during the Pandemic, this particular one for now it seems held at bay but a threat which may return in new and terrible forms like the Black Death at any time, risked their own lives and those of their families to guarantee basic services to us all, and with our vulnerable populations who bear the true costs of what wealth and hegemony of power and privilege we may enjoy, let us always remember that among the causes and origins of our current problems is the failure of our political and economic systems to realize our founding value of equality.
What is the meaning of the Pandemic? Among other things it has exposed the faultlines of our civilization and the internal contradictions whose mechanical failures now threaten us all with civilizational collapse and extinction as consequences of capitalism and colonialism as systems of unequal power, and of control and dominion of nature as flawed coping strategies for our fear of her as uncontrollable, irrational, chaotic, and free; fear of the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
For in this failure of our grasp to reach the limits of our vision we have allowed a failing capitalism to try and bring us down with it, to subvert democracy and the structural safeguards of our freedom embodied in our government as a free society of equals, and as our devastation of the environment creates pandemics and poisons our world to threaten our very lives.
When we will say, Enough! When will we reclaim our liberty and ownership of the public resources we have let slip away into the hands of those who would enslave us?
When we think of labor unions, of strikes and the right of workers to organize in defense of fair and safe work, we must think not only of our universal human rights and our duty of care for each other in solidarity, but also of the systems of oppression and unequal power in which such seizures of power become necessary and arise as imposed conditions of struggle. The event we celebrate today of over one hundred years ago, the Seattle General Strike, was such a victory, one which in large part founded organized labor.
From Cal Winslow writing in Jacobin comes an inspirational account of the Seattle General Strike of 1919 in the wake of the 1918 Flu Pandemic and conditions of austerity and worker exploitation much like those today. May we learn from the examples of history how better to meet the challenges of the future.
“The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last major pandemic. Here’s the full story.
November 11, 1918. The war was finished. There were wild celebrations everywhere — everywhere, that is, in France, Britain, and the United States. Spontaneous demonstrations of relief and happiness erupted, and millions took to the streets of Paris, London, and New York.
In Seattle, the Star pronounced, “War is Over!” The city learned of the armistice on Sunday night, November 10; at once, people took to the streets. In the morning, the mayor was awakened to find the streets filled, his planned proclamation of a holiday irrelevant; his wish for a proper, orderly, patriotic manifestation was superseded.
Revelers celebrated not just the end of the war, but also what they thought to be the end of the so-called Spanish flu. Over the course of that day, makeshift bands appeared, with people banging garbage-can lids and lunch buckets, car horns blasting. Workers abandoned the shipyards, longshoremen quit the waterfront, and the city center was gridlocked. The city’s health authorities, too, were taken aback. There were no masks to be seen; social distancing was defiantly disregarded. They had their own plans in the works, perhaps with some recklessness, to withdraw their edicts, their restrictions on crowds and mandatory masking, and to triumphantly pronounce the influenza beaten.
Sailors, first carriers of the influenza and also its first victims, were ordered into the crowds to ensure that the celebration was official and properly patriotic. The November celebrations were also suggestive of a level of underlying discontent, a prelude to another war coming, to a return of “normalcy” in the nation’s most class-divided, strike-prone city — above all to the great “Seattle Strike.”
“The war to end all wars,” the papers repeated without a blush. Yet 10 million had been lost in the slaughter on the Western Front; millions more were maimed, emotionally as well as physically. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were vast swaths of devastation, the heart of the continent was in ruins, and there were new armies, this time of scavengers and homeless, creatures without hope. The Seattle Star featured a half-page, triumphant Jesus, captioned “Peace on Earth.” Then came the mindless boastings of victory, of “sacred unions,” “homes for heroes,” “democracy at full tilt.” “We won the war!”
The workers of Seattle, however, had never really supported this war, unless one reduced it to “supporting the troops,” the mantra in all wars. Still, they celebrated; especially if it meant an end to long hours, short pay, conscription; to “sedition” charges and “criminal syndicalism” laws; to the red squads, raids, and prison sentences. The killing — nearly 5 million Americans served in World War I, and 53,000 were killed in action — was not restricted to the trenches. On the home front, the influenza killed 675,000, and more than 1,500 deaths were recorded in Seattle.
The Flu Comes to Seattle
In the winter of 1918, much of the city — the schools, and most public places — was still reopening. It remained unclear if the epidemic was, in fact, finished, with a second spike just before Christmas. The heavy rains had begun. The first loggers were drifting back; they joined others — wandering, homeless men on the city’s mean streets, waiting for spring and work to resume. This was ordinary in Seattle in winter. Now, however, newcomers appeared, some still in uniform, wanting work. Some were sick. The Union Record, the city’s union-owned daily newspaper, reported that “peace” abroad was bringing hunger at home. One man, a union representative from the Metal Trades Council (MTC), told reporters that he had been approached “by 15 soldiers in one night, all for bed and board.”
It had taken time for the influenza to reach Seattle. This city of three hundred thousand, situated in the far northwestern corner of the nation, was two mountain ranges and several long days from Chicago by train; it was weeks from the East Coast by the Panama Canal, and still much longer around the Strait of Magellan. Seattle was, in this sense, isolated, yet by war’s end, it had become the center of trade with Asia, two days closer to Vladivostok than its rival to the south, San Francisco. It was the gateway to Alaska and its fisheries. Wheat from the great fields of the Palouse was shipped from its docks.
Seattle had become an imperial outpost. The Puget Sound country bristled with warship building and armed encampments. Camp Lewis, just south of Tacoma, was the largest such base in the West. Bremerton, across the bay, was home port for the navy’s North Pacific fleet. Sailors trained there; warships, meant for the Asian “theater,” were built in its yards. The real war, of course, was an ocean away in the other direction. In spite of this, Seattle’s shipyards — the city’s “basic industry” — produced more ships for the war (ninety in total, steel hulled) than any other shipyard in the country. The yards were “the life” of the city, “pulsing through every [other] industry, affecting all workers.” These yards employed some thirty five thousand men; fifteen thousand more worked in Tacoma’s shipyards.
The influenza, despite its name, originated not in Spain but in Kansas in 1917, settling in Camp Riley. It was well traveled by the following summer’s end. It had first spread eastward, moving from camp to camp, reaching Europe with the arriving American Expeditionary Forces. It swept across Europe, adding a new dimension of horror to the trenches of the Western Front. Then home again to the United States, it returned with soldiers and sailors, killing ferociously. Public health officers in Seattle certainly knew about it and expected it, yet, as elsewhere, they were caught off guard when it actually appeared. It came in late September, by way of infected sailors in Boston dispatched to Philadelphia, then with the 334 of these who set sail from Philadelphia for Puget Sound. On arrival, many were desperately ill.
“In the event the disease appears here,” announced Seattle’s commissioner of health, Dr J.S. McBride, on September 28, “and it is not unlikely that it will, we will endeavor to isolate the first cases and thus try to prevent it becoming an epidemic.” Isolation would begin with places of amusement, theaters, sporting events, restaurants, and saloons. It was also presented as an opportunity to shut down the city’s notorious Skid Row, with its flophouses, saloons, brothels, and various other places of unsavory amusement, including the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies). Industry, however, would carry on, indeed be encouraged — the city’s “interests” were anxious to remain open, free of wartime restrictions, determined to reestablish the “open shop.”
McBride and his staff watched for the first signs of the influenza; these came initially in the Navy’s facilities in Bremerton, then in Camp Lewis with, suddenly, reports of hundreds of cases of a severe influenza. These, the authorities initially insisted, were simply the flu, though noting that, in some cases, this flu quickly became pneumonia. Bremerton reported fourteen deaths. Sailors were ordered to avoid large gatherings. Visitors were banned. Camp Lewis was placed under quarantine.
Still, in Seattle, McBride and staff looked in the wrong places, even when hundreds of cadets at the Naval Training Station at the University of Washington were reported to be suffering from a mild flu. For some reason, they saw the university as set apart. Their demesne was the city; McBride continued to pronounce Seattle influenza-free. Then, on October 4, one cadet was reported dead, hundreds more ill, and four hundred hospitalized. Precious time had been wasted. That night, two influenza cases were reported in the city — each resulting in death.
The next morning, McBride met with the mayor, Ole Hanson, a real estate broker; together they announced to the public that the influenza had found its way to Seattle. McBride ordered all private and public dances prohibited, declared that streetcars and theaters had to be well ventilated, and ordered police to strictly enforce the anti-spitting ordinance. He appealed to the public to practice a voluntary quarantine. Over the next days, however, closings were ordered — first church services, then places of entertainment, then the public schools.
The suddenness of the closures took the public by surprise and sparked some resistance. The superintendent of schools, Frank Cooper, believed them to be unwise: “I consider it more dangerous to have children running around the streets loose than to have them in school where they will be under strict medical supervision.” Crowds of people continued to congregate in the city’s theater district, large numbers of sailors mixing with them, despite police efforts to keep amusements closed. The police organized an “Influenza Squad” to enforce the orders, but results were mixed. Those who could began leaving the city, some to mountain retreats, others further afield. The writer Mary McCarthy’s parents evacuated to Chicago, where they each were stricken, dying before the year’s end, leaving their children orphans. McCarthy was returned to Seattle and put in the care of an aging aunt.
Seattle’s officials singled out the shipyards for attention, though more in keeping with wartime patriotism than with concern for the health of the workers. The yards, after all, far from healthy places, were well known as rough-and-tumble work sites where “men came out covered in soot and red paint, exhausted from wielding thundering riveting guns. Every day or so some unlucky shipyard worker would be carried out in the dead wagon.” Influenza added to this toll. Still, McBride wanted to keep these workers on the job. He believed he could, especially as many of these workers toiled outside, where they were thought to be less susceptible to the disease than other factory workers.
Nevertheless, he sought to inoculate the entire workforce with one of the sera that had been developed. “Let no question of money or men interfere with your work.” When requests came from others, he responded, “Seattle needs all the serum we can grow, and we will share with nobody until our shipyard workers and other citizens have been properly inoculated.” Workers were skeptical; war, the virus, and the brutality of work had produced widespread fatalism, a realism in the face of calamity in all quarters. The numbers of the sick and the dead rose, and by mid-October, four thousand cases had been reported; no evidence ever appeared to suggest the sera had been of use.
Hanson and McBride were stubbornly confident that isolation and closures would work. Hanson maintained to the end that the influenza was really just a form of the flu, a “grippe.” He believed that it would last no more than a week. They were wrong. In no large American city was the influenza contained quickly.
Within days, the flu reached all sections of Seattle, though “south of Yesler” and the Rainier Valley, home to Seattle’s slums and the cheap housing of the workers, suffered most. Frustrated, the authorities blamed a noncompliant public for the influenza’s persistence. They continued to work to see that the closure orders were widened and enforced. On October 28, McBride issued new orders, including mandatory wearing of flu masks. These were worn reluctantly; they came to be the symbols of Seattle besieged. Streetcar conductors were ordered to bar people not donning a face covering. Hanson told commuters that they had better find a mask and wear it, “or tomorrow morning they will walk to work.” In late October, however, the numbers of new cases of infection leveled off and then began to fall.
Strike Town
Seattle’s shipyard workers believed they had sacrificed unreasonably for the sake of the war. Their hours had been long, their work grueling. Hulet Wells, the onetime socialist president of the Seattle Central Labor Council (CLC), also president of the state’s Socialist Party, while awaiting sentencing for opposing conscription, found work at Skinner & Eddy, the largest of the yards. There he encountered a; “howling bedlam . . . a wilderness of strange machines, whirling belts and belching fires . . . The human ant heap boiled with all the specialists that fit into the modern shipyard. Everywhere there was deafening noise, boilers rang, planers screamed, long white-hot rods were smashed into bolt machines. Here was the angle-bending floor where black men beat a tattoo with heavy sledges, and here a steam hammer thumped its measured blows . . . [as well as] the wrenching scenes of the injured, the sirens of the ambulances, and the dying or dead being carted off into the chaos of the waterfront roadways.”
In 1917 and 1918, the city’s unions increasingly felt pressure from the federal government and its shipping board. The shipyard workers had worked with standards set nationally by labor boards in Washington, DC, even when believing themselves punished by these standards. It was indisputable that prices were higher on the West Coast — above all in Seattle — than in the East. The unions were especially intent on raising the wages of the unskilled and semiskilled, an immediate necessity in breaking down divisions in the shops. However, wage demands were repeatedly rejected. Seattle’s workers, inheritors of a decade of intense conflict, by the war’s end, believed themselves betrayed by the government. They had been lied to, they believed, by the president, the shipping board, and the city’s health officials. They were bitter, angry, and itching for a fight. They voted to strike in December. The January strike was inevitable.
The men walked out on the morning of January 21, 1919. There were women scattered through their ranks, as well as black workers, though they were few and their union status unclear. Virtually all the AFL’s international unions in these trades barred women and blacks. A. E. Miller, the chairman of the MTC, announced the strike “absolutely clean,” meaning that thirty-five thousand workers struck en masse, and none came to take their places. They showed “splendid solidarity and great enthusiasm,” undaunted by the winter rain. Tacoma and Aberdeen quickly followed. Speaking on behalf of the workers, John McKelvey defied the owners. The “shipyard millionaires have been getting all the credit for the ships we have built. Oh yes, they’re ship builders. If they think they can build ships let ’em go ahead and build them!”
The Union Record brought news of the strikers’ plight to its fifty thousand subscribers, supporting the strike without qualification. Next to its front-page lead on January 2, “45,000 Men Out in Sound Cities,” it ran an article titled, “Tremendous Profits Made by Seattle Shipbuilding Firms,” revealing the businesses’ costs, sales, and profits. The day’s editorial, “A Great Strike,” explained: “The whole question of wages is bound up in the tremendous increase in the cost of living in Seattle.”
The strike, however, was not just a symptom — real enough in itself — but an indication as well of deeper frustrations and dissatisfactions. The strike wave of the war years — “an epidemic of strikes” — was both national and international, inspired in part by syndicalism. Seattle was both a strike center and a radical center, a stronghold of working-class socialism; its unions’ commitment to workers’ control ran deep, and support for the Russian Revolution was widespread. Kate Sadler, the workers’ “Joan of Arc,” had led Seattle’s delegation to the Mooney conference. Crystal Eastman in the Liberator reported that Sadler led her city’s “wild ones,” who insisted on a general strike no later than May Day to free the framed San Francisco union man. “Russia Did It!” would be the lead of a leaflet penned by the young Harvey O’Connor (illustrated with a brawny worker and a fat capitalist in a coffin — twenty thousand were distributed).
At the same time, Seattle was filling up with unemployed, homeless, demobilized young men, and it was still not entirely free from the flu. In response, the MTC packed the Hippodrome with thousands to announce the formation of a “Soldiers, Sailors and Workers Council.” The meeting went forward despite the authorities, who surrounded the hall with military police. Thousands gathered in Tacoma as well, with Camp Lewis soldiers, no longer under quarantine, in attendance.
It was increasingly clear that unions did not know with whom they were to negotiate: the national board or the local employers. In either case, the employers refused to budge, as did the eastern board members, the shippers, and their allies in the national AFL unions. The MTC thus turned to Seattle’s Central Labor Council (CLC), the federation of 110 local unions — the organization that, in defiance of the AFL, was built from the bottom up, that championed industrial unions, supported sympathy strikes, cooperated with the IWW, and was led by socialists — with a request for the strike.
“The idea of a general strike swept the ranks of organized labor like a gale,” wrote O’Connor. On January 22, in an assembly of the CLC, in the Labor Temple, the metal workers made their case, requesting that Seattle’s workers join them in a general strike. The aim would be not only to win their demands but also to present a show of force in the face of the employers’ renewed open-shop campaign. They believed that the fate of the organized labor movement itself was at stake. Representatives of the city’s local trade unions and rank-and-file militants packed the Labor Temple. According to O’Connor, “Every reference to the general strike was cheered to the echo; the cautions of the conservatives . . . were hooted down” or interrupted by shouting, clapping, and singing.
The CLC proposed a referendum on the strike, which passed unanimously. The enthusiasm that evening brought with it high rhetoric, emotion, even tears. Then came a cornucopia of demands; appetites grew, delegates revealing their own grievances and aspirations, hopeful that these, too, might be addressed. The metal workers, however, insisted that the strike’s demands be limited to those of the shipyard workers already out — what they wanted was a “clean-cut demonstration of the economic power of organized labor.”
The meeting ended in an uproar when delegate Fred Nelson unfurled a banner showing a soldier and a sailor in uniform with a worker in overalls and the slogan “Together We Will Win.” This was followed by “a storm of applause which lasted several minutes,” abating only when delegate Ben King of the Painters, just returned from the Mooney Congress in Chicago, recounted “sleeping between soldiers and sailors and they are all with us.” The applause “broke out afresh.”
America’s First General Strike
On February 6, 1919, Seattle’s workers — all of them — struck. In doing so, they literally took control of the city. They brought the city to a halt — a strange silence settled on the normally bustling streets, and on the waterfront, where “nothing moved but the tide.” The CLC’s Union Record reported sixty-five thousand union members on strike. It was a general strike, the first of its kind in the United States. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand working people participated — the strikers were joined by workers not in unions, unemployed workers, and family members. The city’s authorities were rendered powerless — there was indeed no power that could challenge the workers. There were soldiers in the city and many more at nearby Camp Lewis, not to mention thousands of newly enlisted armed deputies, but to unleash these on a peaceful city? The regular police were reduced to onlookers; the generals hesitated.
Rank-and-file workers, union by union, elected the strike leadership, a strike committee. The strike committee elected an executive committee. Meeting virtually nonstop, they ensured the health, welfare, and safety of the city. Garbage was collected, the hospitals were supplied, babies got milk, and the people were fed, including some thirty thousand a day at the strikers’ kitchens.
The streets were safe, rarely safer, patrolled by an unarmed labor guard of workers. It was reported that crime abated. Nevertheless, the rich, those who could not or would not escape to Portland or California, armed themselves. The Seattle Star asked, “Under which flag?” — the red, white, and blue, or the red. The mayor, Hanson, claimed the latter and warned that a revolution was underway. The AFL piled on, denouncing the strikers and sending emissaries by the hundreds. The general strike was not a revolution. It was a coordinated action in support of the city’s shipyard workers. Still, there had never been anything quite like it. The strikers left their jobs amid the great strike wave of the First World War years and an international crisis that was, in fact, revolutionary in some places — a crisis evolving in the shadow of revolution in Russia.
It was no wonder, then, that revolution was in the air — terrifying some, inspiring others. Then, too, no one knew for certain just how far this strike might go. The strike was simple and straightforward for many, a powerful statement of solidarity and nothing more. But others did indeed want more: all-out victory for the shipyard workers, for example. Some wanted much more, but surely no one could know, not on that cold February morning, not with any certainty, just what lay ahead. Hence the Union Record’s February 6 editorial, written by Anna Louise Strong: “ON THURSDAY AT 10 A.M. There will be many cheering and there will be some who fear. Both of these emotions are useful, but not too much of either. We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead — NO ONE KNOWS WHERE! We do not need hysteria. We need the iron march of labor.”
Seattle’s streets were quiet, and some thought this a problem. “Seattle Strikers Too Polite,” led the Appeal to Reason, the Midwestern Socialist newspaper. But this missed the point. The strikers feared provocation and had good reason to — it had been used time and again in the war against the Wobblies. Where the workers gathered, however, in the “feeding stations,” the union halls, the co-op markets, or the neighborhoods where workers and their families lived, it was another story.
The “feeding stations” were showcases of self-organization. They may have been authorized by the strike committees; on the ground, they depended on the creativity of ordinary people. Thousands of volunteers took on the strike’s tasks, including running the kitchens, organizing milk distribution, and policing the city. The process of handing out milk was elaborate. “The dairies supplied by the milk dealers were only eleven in number, [and] so located that it would have been impossible for the mothers of Seattle to secure milk unless they owned automobiles.” The milk wagon drivers therefore “chose 35 locations spaced throughout the city, secured the use of space in stores, and proceeded to set up neighborhood milk stations.” Strong asked if the kitchens ever gave away meals. “Lots of them,” was the response. “We don’t refuse anyone, union or non-union if they can’t pay.” The strike may well have been the only occasion, before or since, when no one in Seattle went hungry.
On Saturday night, the strikers held a dance, and as late as Monday, they organized massive strike rallies. In the Georgetown neighborhood, the crowd was so large that the building sank somewhat and had to be evacuated. The meeting reconvened, and with “great enthusiasm . . . it was decided to make the meetings a regular weekly event . . . it was unanimous that the strike should continue until a living wage had been obtained by the shipyard workers. . . . Many of those present expressed the opinion that the scope of the meetings should be enlarged to include the wives and daughters of the workers, and to make them real community gatherings for the discussion of questions in which all are concerned.”
In all these places, the strike was the topic. It was analyzed, criticized, extolled, and debated, and when the workers’ representatives packed the rowdy, emotion-filled strike committee meetings, they came prepared; they were making history, and they knew it. The general strike served notice that Seattle’s workers had become a class “for themselves” — class conscious and “there at the creation,” as the late historian E. P. Thompson put it. “Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never just the same way,” he wrote in The Making of the English Working Class.
Stopping Short
Alas, “The exhilaration from the marvelous display of solidarity experienced Thursday and Friday began to give way to apprehension,” wrote O’Connor. By the third day of the strike, they realized that the Seattle labor movement stood alone. The strike had not spread down the coast to California, nor was there support from across the nation. There was little, O’Connor observed, “to give aid and comfort, even verbally, to the labor movements of Seattle and Tacoma. Seattle, unfortunately, was all too unique in its militancy.” And, against them, the response of the authorities was unrelenting, especially the fearmongers. They frantically forecast a terrible future at hand: Bolshevism, anarchy.
Hanson, egged on by the papers, denounced the strike as “un-American” and refused to negotiate. The Post-Intelligencer observed: “The big fact that stands out from the temporary confusion of business is that Seattle, given a brief time for readjustment, would be well off, if not better than before, if the whole of its striking population [were] suddenly withdrawn from the city.” Hanson threatened martial law if the strike were not ended by 10 a.m. on Saturday. The “interests” in New York and Washington, DC, joined the chorus. The AFL denounced the strike, with the Teamsters Joint Council ordering the strikers back to work. There were telephone calls and telegrams, and a deluge of intimidation, threats, and vilification from the international offices.
The AFL censored the Central Labor Council and would later take credit for defeating its “strike.” Then the international officers arrived in person, threatening to rescind charters, seize union properties, and fire staff. Meanwhile, the shipyards in the East and California carried on as usual. The risk of the owners permanently shutting down the Seattle yards now seemed only too real — deliberative, political deindustrialization.
On Saturday, February 8, several unions returned, though this was by no means a stampede. The Executive Committee voted eleven to two to end the strike. They chose Jimmy Duncan, president of the CLC, not a delegate, to speak to the strike committee for them. He tried to convince those in attendance that continuing the walkout was futile. He failed. The strike committee, infuriated by Hanson’s threats and still committed to victory, overwhelmingly voted to continue the strike, as did the longshoremen and the Metal Trades unions. The divide increasingly became one between the rank and file, on the one hand, and the executive committee, on the other.
Then on Monday, with more unions yielding, Duncan returned to the strike committee. He recommended ending the strike on Tuesday at noon. He requested that those unions that had returned to their jobs come back out so that the strikers could return united; as they had left on Thursday, they would return on Tuesday. The shipyard strikers remained out one month longer.
A Class in Conflict
How is this strike to be assessed? Harvey O’Connor wrote, “For the majority of Seattle unions, there was no sense of defeat as the strike ended. They had demonstrated their solidarity with their brothers in the yards, and the memory of the great days when labor had shown its strength glowed in their minds.”
This sentiment was widely shared among Seattle’s workers. The CLC’s minutes are laden with messages of congratulations: the Metal Trades Council in Aberdeen commended Seattle’s workers “for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike [and urged] one big union and a 24-hour strike on May 1st to demonstrate our solidarity.” From the Astoria Central Labor Council came a communiqué “complimenting Organized Labor for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike.” Mine Workers Locals No. 2917, 1044, 1890, and 4309 sent resolutions “condemning the attitude of the ‘Star’ upon the strike and expressing willingness to lay down tools if conditions warrant.” The King County Pomona Grange pledged support by furnishing produce and finances to the strikers, while cash and expressions of solidarity came from local businesses.
Others concurred. The Socialists’ New York Call wrote:
Whatever may be said of the Seattle strike, it certainly is not a case of ‘blind striking,’ as the Journal of Commerce affirms. It has been calculated and prepared and is one of the finest examples of sacrifice and solidarity that workingmen have displayed in many years. It is a sympathetic strike participated in by workers who have no grievance of their own, at least none that they are raising at this time. They have walked out in support of another group of workers, with the view of aiding the latter to secure a speedy victory.
Max Eastman, editor of the Liberator, had visited Seattle that winter. What he may have contributed to the cause there, if anything, is not recorded. He did, however, record his evaluation: “The General Strike in this city of Seattle filled with hope and happiness the hearts of millions of people in all places of the earth. . . . You demonstrated the possibility of that loyal solidarity of the working class which is the sole remaining hope of liberty for mankind.”
The academic version of this story, which remains widely accepted, comes via the work of Robert L. Friedheim. “The first major general strike in the United States ended quietly at noon on February 11, 1919,” he wrote, adding without evidence, “Somewhat sheepishly, Seattle’s workers returned to their jobs in shops, factories, mills, hotels, warehouses and trolley barns. The strike had been a failure, and they all knew it. In the days ahead, they were to learn that it was worse than a failure — it was a disaster.” The CLC’s own strike committee, however, and to its great credit, commissioned a committee to produce a history of the strike. Anna Louise Strong at once penned her own findings:
The vast majority [of workers] struck to express their solidarity . . . and they succeeded beyond their expectations. They saw the labor movement come out almost as one man and tie up the industries of the city. They saw the Japanese and the IWW and many individual workers join in the strike, and they responded with a glow of appreciation. They saw garbage wagons and laundry wagons going along the streets marked “exempt by strike committee.” They saw the attention of the whole continent turned on the Seattle shipyards. They learned a great deal more than they expected to learn — more than anyone in Seattle knew before. They learned how a city is taken apart and put together again. They learned what it meant to supply milk to the babies of the city, to feed 30,000 people with a brand-new organization. They came close for the first time in their lives to the problems of management.
In the course of the strike’s five days, there had been no lockouts or significant dismissals. There had been no strikebreakers, no “replacement” workers needing protection. No mass arrests, thus no search for lawyers, no defense funds to build. There had been no violence — hence no funerals, no wakes, no widows with children to support. The leaders of the strike committee and the Central Labor Council worked to get the strike’s handful of victims — casualties were few — back to work. They remained quite capable of achieving this.
The fact was that the employers dared not test the workers, not in the short run. Seattle remained a union city. There was, of course, a sense of things getting back to normal, the exception being the waterfront, where the roller-coaster conflict continued. The shippers imposed the open shop, only to have this reversed in August. Now, at last, the ILA achieved job control and a single, alphabetical list. Seattle’s workers remained “strike prone,” among the most combative in the nation right into 1920–21. Wages remained relatively high in the city, as did the cost of living, leveling off but remaining above national averages through 1921.
Seattle’s workers had formed themselves as a class in conflict — in struggles that took place in the forests, on the waterfront, in cafés, and in laundries. They forged their class identity in the long, hard fight for industrial unions and the closed shop, and in the fight for workers’ power. At an early moment, the utopians of the Cooperative Commonwealth had taught socialism and attempted to practice what they preached. Later, the IWW and the Socialist Party fought for it, with the CLC, one step at a time, intent on implementing it.
The 1910s had been a decade of organizing, cooperating, and striking, the most basic weapons of working people in battles that were sometimes won and sometimes lost. Consciousness arose in the utopian colonies, in logging camps and mills, in free speech fights, and on the waterfront, in war and in dissent, in strikes of the “telephone girls,” waitresses, hotel maids, “lady barbers,” and laundry workers, in co-ops and in working-class neighborhoods.
Seattle’s workers transformed a world of war, of sickness, death, and grief, into a great celebration of the living, if only for five days. The general strike was, for Seattle’s workers, a giant step toward a future that might be theirs. This aspiration was surely valid in terms of their own experience. They insisted that their vision was by no means the “pie in the sky” of the preachers and the politicians. A better world was possible. It still is.”
Cal Winslow places the General Strike in the context of the birth of America’s labor movement in Seattle in his article in Jacobin entitled
Seattle, “the Soviet of Washington”; “Decades before Amazon dominated the city, Seattle was the fiery site of labor unrest, radical action — and the US’s only true general strike.
Seattle gleams under the grey skies that characterize its climate. Container ships from China wait in Elliott Bay to unload, while tour boats head out to Alaska’s shrinking glaciers. The Great Wheel towers over Pier 57, and there are tourists everywhere. Two gigantic sports arenas dominate the southern end of the waterfront, where in times past seamen brawled and the longshoremen struck the great ships — losing in 1916, winning at last in 1934. The football stadium is the prize of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who obtained the public funding for its construction. The best seats in the house sell for more than $1,000 and the approaches are lined with upscale bistros and bars. Just south of Lake Union, Allen’s Vulcan real estate company is building a head-office complex for another tech firm, Amazon, complete with interlinked spherical glasshouses enclosing a miniature rainforest. Facebook and Google are also moving in. Powered by these new developments, the Emerald City has the fastest growing population of any major urban area in the US. The world’s two richest men, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, both reside here.
Seattle flourishes, then — it is an important place. But can we ask: what sort of place? A stage set, perhaps, for the new Gilded Age, in which corporate wealth and “vibrant” street life can distract the eye from all manner of social contradictions. Seattleites don’t mind the rain; in fact, they love the outdoors. However, public space is at a premium and access to its beaches severely restricted. Tech workers take great pride in Seattle’s high rating for “livability,” yet the cost of housing is rising even quicker than in the Bay Area and the traffic is often unbearable. Hundreds sleep on the street each night. Tent cities appear, reminiscent of the 1930s “Hooverville” shanty town erected in the mud flats south of the business district, and just as unwelcome to the authorities. Meanwhile elsewhere in the city, second homes abound.
Still, there are ghosts dwelling here: old memories — dimly held, to be sure. Here is Yesler Way, once better known as Skid Road because of the logs rolled downhill along its course to Henry Yesler’s sawmill on the shore. Nowadays a nondescript thoroughfare dotted with cafes frequented by tourists, including a branch of the city’s ubiquitous Starbucks chain, it used to heave with disreputable saloons, brothels, and flophouses, making Skid Road synonymous with any district where the down-and-out may gather: places that are rough, sometimes radical. The Industrial Workers of the World put down roots in this quarter among loggers, itinerant farm workers, and miners bound for the Yukon, as well as the shipyard workers who led the Seattle General Strike of February 6–10, 1919, the only true general strike in US history and the one occasion when American workers have actually taken over the running of a city — the sort of endeavor which earned this state, now given over to the billionaires of the new economy, the appellation “the Soviet of Washington.”
Pacific Hub
Seattle is situated on a vertical strip of land between Puget Sound — an “inland sea” off the northern Pacific — and the freshwater Lake Washington. Nonindigenous settlement began with the arrival of a couple of dozen migrants from Illinois in 1851, a few years after the Oregon Treaty fixed the border between the United States and British America at the 49th parallel. The incomers named the township after Chief Sealth of the area’s Duwamish and Suquamish tribes. Upon incorporation by the Washington Territorial legislature in 1869, the city had just two thousand inhabitants. This figure would swell to eighty thousand by the turn of the century. As places of note, Seattle and Tacoma, thirty miles to the south, were the warring creations of competing northern railroads. Two days closer than California to Vladivostok and Asian markets, Seattle became the main distribution hub for the northern Pacific Rim, usurping San Francisco’s former hegemony over the entire Pacific Slope. In addition to its command of Washington State’s forests and the great wheat belt of the Palouse steppe, Seattle also dominated the trade and fisheries of Alaska, whose economy was boosted by an influx of prospectors during the Klondike gold rush. Jobs in distributive and wholesale trades, as well as shipbuilding, attracted migrants fleeing slums, unemployment, and poverty in the East — blacklisted railroad workers, redundant miners, famished wheat farmers. When the mayor of Butte, the class battleground in Montana, visited Seattle in 1919 he recognized large numbers of ex-copper miners working in its shipyards. If Minnesota and neighbouring farm states appealed to the more prosperous Scandinavian immigrants, Swedes above all, western Washington with its extractive industries drew in the much poorer Norwegians and Finns, though core activists in the General Strike came from the British Isles.
The timber economy of Western Washington was dominated by the Weyerhaeuser Lumber Trust, which mounted a full-scale assault on the vast stands of ancient cedar, western hemlock, and Douglas fir forest. Timber from Washington State would buttress the copper mines of the West, underpin its railroad lines, and build its rapidly expanding cities, above all in California. The loggers toiled for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and slept in company shacks. Conditions in the mills were neither easier nor safer: giant saws, deadly belts, horrific noise, dust, smoke and fire. When the heavy winter rains came, the lumberjacks wrapped up their bindlestiffs and fled to Skid Road. There they would remain, sinking into debt, until job sharks and lumbermen herded them back to the woods. They were despised by Seattle’s bourgeoisie as “timber beasts.”
The well-to-do lived away from Skid Road on the leafy boulevards of First and Capitol hills, along Magnolia Bluff and overlooking the lake in Madrona and Washington Park. They boasted a flourishing cultural life, including a fine university built in the French Renaissance style in Union Bay. The politicians and their newspapers might feud — what to do with the infamous Skid Road? — but Seattle was staunchly progressive: women’s suffrage, co-operatives, municipal ownership, growth. As it expanded from a low-lying base around Pioneer Square, the tops of surrounding hills were lopped off — “regraded” — for the benefit of developers. The neighboring town of Ballard was annexed in 1907 and the harbor municipalized four years later, a blow for the big railway and shipping interests struck on behalf of small manufacturers, minor shipping lines, and farmers anxious to force down rates. The new Port of Seattle developed some of the best waterfront facilities in the country, including the sort of moving gantry crane still used in container terminals today. The construction of a ship canal connecting Puget Sound with Lake Washington also commenced in these years.
In the 1890s, utopian land-settlement schemes in Seattle’s vicinity drew in idealists and free-thinkers. Harry Ault, Union Record editor, spent his teenage years in Equality Colony, Skagit County, in a family of disenchanted Populists. He recalled his mother feeding workers in Coxey’s Army of the unemployed as it passed through Cincinnati in 1894. In the 1910s, Seattle’s established working-class communities — Ballard, “South of Yesler,” and into Rainier Valley — were blighted by poor housing, threadbare amenities, and lack of access to the Sound, the green forests, or the great mountain ranges beyond — all that the city cherished, and still does. This rarely registered as a problem, however, among municipal reformers.
Manual labor was dangerous as well as poorly rewarded: wrote one labor activist at the time, “Every day or so some unlucky shipyard workers would be carried out in the dead wagon.” When the US Commission on Industrial Relations held hearings in the city in 1914, Wisconsin’s great labor specialist, John Commons, noted a “more bitter feeling between employers and employees than in any other city in the United States.” Seattle’s workers fought back against their oppressors as a class — and as a class, created a culture of their own: unions that were “clean,” not run by gangsters; a mass-circulation labor-owned newspaper, the Union Record — it became a daily in 1918, the only one of its kind; its circulation topped one hundred thousand in the aftermath of the strike. Socialist schools ran lectures indoors and out; IWW singing groups; community dances, and picnics. Milwaukee may have had its socialist congressman, Victor Berger; Los Angeles almost had a socialist mayor, Job Harriman; but Seattle’s socialists were working class and “Red.” Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs judged Washington State the “most advanced” and long suspected that it might be the first to achieve socialism. Electoral success proved elusive, but Washington claimed several thousand paid-up adherents, ranking second only to Oklahoma in the proportion of party members per head of population. The Left took control of the party in Seattle in 1912 after a protracted factional struggle. Proponents of industrial unionism, they were thorns in the side of national party officials who supported Samuel Gompers, conservative president of the craft-based American Federation of Labor. Seattle workers overwhelmingly supported the principle of industrial unions — and by implication, workers’ control. “I believe that 95 per cent of us agree that the workers should control industry,” wrote Ault. Still, most unions retained their affiliation to the AFL. Progressives were critical of craft divisions but thought the IWW impractical and wanted to remain in the “mainstream.” They looked to James Duncan, chair of the Seattle Central Labor Council, for leadership. A metal worker born in Fife, Scotland, clearly influenced by syndicalism, his compromise formula came to be known as “Duncanism.” The city’s labor movement was centralized around the SCLC, which coordinated rather than supplanted the craft unions to ensure that all contracts for crafts within a particular industry ran concurrently, allowing for bargaining as a unit. Though a consistent critic of the IWW which challenged the AFL from the left, Duncan nevertheless acknowledged it as “a pacesetter.” In this environment, social democracy and revolutionary unionism could intermingle. Seattle was an IWW no less than a Socialist Party stronghold, home to its western newspaper, the Industrial Worker, and scene of free-speech fights ending in mass arrests, beatings, and victories. “Two card” workers were commonplace: an AFL card for the job, an IWW card for the principle.
Class solidarity wasn’t all-embracing, however. As late as September 1917, the Daily Call reported that one of the issues in a meatpackers’ strike was the workers’ demand for a white cook. Alice Lord, talented organizer of the city’s women workers, above all its waitresses, was a committed exclusionist. The relatively few black workers in Seattle at this point, just 1 percent of the population, took what work they could, including as strikebreakers in the longshoremen’s strike of 1916. There were, however, signs of a shift in attitudes among the white majority. Seattle’s most popular street speaker, the socialist’s firebrand Kate Sadler, talked at black churches and was a scathing critic of exclusion and shop-floor segregation. The Union Record likewise insisted on the need “to break down racial barriers in the West.” Ault told a congressional hearing on Japanese immigration that he had “little patience with racial prejudice,” recalling his early childhood in segregated Kentucky.
Voyage of the Verona
The opening of the Panama Canal in August 1914 lifted West Coast trade, offsetting the recession which had hung over the States since the previous year. Seeking a share of the shipping companies’ profits, longshoremen struck on June 1, 1916 for a closed shop, higher wages, and a nine-hour day. Workers in San Francisco quickly settled, but Seattle and Tacoma stayed out. When Andrew Furuseth, head of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, defended the San Francisco leadership at an SCLC meeting in September, he was chased from the hall with shouts of “coward” and “quitter.” The strike shook Seattle. The Washington National Guard deployed along its harbor, which “resembled a battleground. Non-union men went uptown looking for fights. Union longshoremen beat up scabs on docks and ship. There were fist fights, knife fights, docks bombed, pier fires, shots fired and murders.” By the strike’s end on October 4 — Tacoma and a number of smaller locals held out longer — there were 850 scabs working the docks and the longshoremen had lost control of the waterfront. They returned to work under the open shop plus the “fink hall” which screened out the International Longshoremen’s Association and IWW.
The shingle weavers of Everett, the “City of Smokestacks” thirty miles to Seattle’s north, were engaged in their own desperate strike — victims of nothing short of a reign of terror. “At every stage the Everett police and the private lumber guards took the initiative in beating and shooting workers for speaking on their streets,” recalled Anna Louise Strong, who reported on the unrest for the New York Evening Post. On November 5, 1916, three hundred Wobblies embarked on the steamships Verona and Calista bound for the mill town. No one aboard expected a warm welcome from the authorities, but murder was not foreseen. On its arrival, the Verona was met with gunfire from lawmen and vigilantes. At least five workers were killed, all of them unarmed, and dozens injured. Two “citizen deputies” were also slain, although the fatal shots were fired from the shore, seventy-four people aboard the Verona were charged with murder. The Everett massacre was in some ways a Pacific Northwest Peterloo: an assault on free speech, fair play, and the very notion of “rights.” Disbelief, then anger, coursed through Seattle’s working-class districts. The IWW turned Everett into a cause célèbre, stumping the West on behalf of the accused. “These seventy-four men represent the migratory worker, the element that while necessary is ferociously exploited in this Western country,” declared IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a dozen rallies. “They want the good things in life as much as any other member of the human race and they are organizing in the IWW to get them.” There was a sea change in popular opinion, a massive swing to the left. The SCLC persuaded Seattle lawyer George Vanderveer, “Attorney for the Damned,” to assist the Verona defendants. He secured their acquittal the following spring. The Daily Call reported that IWW membership had risen to twenty thousand and that the Wobblies now employed a dozen paid organizers — exaggerated figures, perhaps, but after the serious setback on the docks the IWW had undeniably gained fresh impetus.
The Wobblies took this forward momentum into the woods: a general strike involving some fifty thousand loggers and mill workers. “They breathe bad air in the camps. That ruins their lungs. They eat bad food. That ruins their stomachs. The foul conditions shorten their lives and make their short lives miserable,” lumber organizer James Thompson told the Industrial Commission during hearings in Seattle. The IWW had always idolized the itinerant workers of the West. They set out from Seattle to organize them and succeeded. Their demands were typically straightforward: an eight-hour day, no work on Sundays or public holidays, sanitary kitchens and satisfactory food, single spring beds with clean bedding, no workers under sixteen in the mills, no discrimination against IWW members. In July 2017, the IWW held a mass rally of 3,500 workers at Seattle’s Dreamland Rink. The meeting began with the singing of “Solidarity Forever.” Kate Sadler and IWW organizer J. T. “Red” Doran were the featured speakers.
The police, sheriffs, National Guard, and US Army responded to the strike with savage repression. The jails filled up; prisoners were beaten. Strike leader James Rowan and twenty IWW members were arrested in a single swoop in the city of Spokane. The federal government organized a rival organization, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen. As the strike spluttered, the Wobblies adjusted their tactics: a “strike on the job,” the loggers working their desired eight-hour shifts. The conclusion, in March 1918, was a sensation: the eight-hour day won and a long list of improvements in the camps. It was one of the IWW’s greatest accomplishments and a source of class pride well beyond the ranks of the IWW. Duncan drew the obvious moral: “the terribly effective force which takes the name of IWW … is largely made up of men who consider regular trade unionism ‘too slow.’” It was, he acknowledged, a “threat to the prestige of trade unionism on the Coast.”
Nevertheless, traditional unionism also thrived amid the industrial boom stoked by federal military procurement as Woodrow Wilson took the US into the First World War. “A red-letter year in the history of organized labour,” Duncan celebrated in July 1917. “A dozen new unions have been organized and all of the Seattle unions are flourishing.” He singled out the streetcar men whose membership had risen to 1,600; the telephone operators with nearly 1,100. Industrial action by the laundresses in particular had struck fear into Seattle’s respectable classes. Within a week, all the city’s major laundries had more or less closed down. Hotels and clubs began to run short of clean linen. The bourgeois Seattle Times fretted that the “family washtub would emerge from oblivion in thousands of Seattle homes.” The laundry workers took their case into the neighborhoods: a fair in Fremont, a parade in Rainier Valley. Stung by hostile public opinion, the employers rapidly capitulated. But if such triumphs deepened working-class consciousness, they brought down fierce repression, foretelling worse to come. William Preston, Jr, has revealed that “the lumber operators of the Northwest provided the initial impetus in the evolution of federal policy” — that is, the “Red Scare” and the Palmer raids. The workers’ movement in Seattle was strong, certainly, but not in Gramsci’s sense hegemonic. US entry into the European bloodbath in April 1917 turned dissent into treason. Gloves off, the federal government moved decisively against the IWW, indicting its top leadership. In Chicago, 101 members were tried and convicted of a range of alleged conspiracies. State vigilantism was visited upon Seattle, regarded as a center of both pro-German and pro-Bolshevik sentiment. The Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. despised the city’s workers as “the scum of the earth” who recognized “no law and no authority save the policeman’s night stick or physical violence.” There were police raids, ransacked offices, mass arrests. Emil Herman, state secretary of the Socialist Party was charged with violations of the Espionage Act and imprisoned in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. Hulet Wells, a former president of the SCLC, was sentenced to two years in federal prisons for passing out “No Conscription” handbills, along with Sam Sadler, one-time president of the longshoremen.
Feting the Shilka
In this extraordinarily tense atmosphere, the revolution came to Seattle on the Friday before Christmas, 1917. The Russian cargo vessel Shilka, red flags flying, steamed into Elliott Bay. Seattle’s socialists, its Wobblies, its dockers, metal workers, waitresses and shingle weavers, scrambled to the docks to greet the newcomers, as did naval officers and city police wary that the ship might contain Bolshevik gold, even perhaps munitions. In fact, the Shilka carried only beans and peas in its hold, and simply needed to refuel. But the arrival of a soviet of Russian sailors was momentous in itself. For the workers, its arrival greatly added to the festive mood. The sailors were fêted. There were testimonials, speeches and spontaneous singing — the “Marseillaise,” also the “Red Flag.” Hundreds of Seattleites jammed into the IWW Hall on Second Avenue where they greeted a young sailor, Danil Teraninoff, on stage with rapturous applause. “Never in Seattle has there been such a demonstration of revolutionary sentiment as at the moment the Russian fellow worker ascended the platform,” reported the socialist Daily Call. The visit of the Shilka sealed the extraordinary romance of Seattle’s working people with the October days, their passionate sympathy and solidarity with the revolution unparalleled in an American context. According to the late Philip Foner, “no labour body was a more consistent defender of the Russian revolution than the Seattle Central Labor Council.” Seattle delegates to AFL national conventions pressed for official recognition of the fledgling workers’ state, to no avail. The longshoremen intercepted railroad cars with loads labeled “sewing machines,” unearthing rifles and ammunition bound for Admiral Kolchak’s White armies on the Siberian front. The IWW resolved that they would “rather starve than receive wages for loading ships on a mission of murder.” The authorities, alarmed when not hysterical, “discovered,” among other things, Bolshevik conspiracies which trade unionists had every practical reason to deny. Until recently historians tended to accept these denials at face value, in so doing diminishing these remarkable events. On the contrary, the Russian Revolution was indeed a factor — a contradictory one, yes: inspiring the Left while terrifying the upper classes — in Seattle’s General Strike.
The political culture of Seattle in these years was shaped not only by its own tumultuous industrial-relations history but also by currents sweeping through working-class movements internationally. The Union Record published letters from Lenin including his “Letter to American Workers”; the Industrial Worker reported on a Labour socialist conference in Leeds where Ramsey MacDonald, flanked by Tom Mann, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Bertrand Russell, “hailed” the Russian Revolution. The new spirit of industrial radicalism spread far beyond its natural home in the IWW. Even where issues with management were “pure and simple,” bitter conflicts ensued. The AFL also felt the heat, its collaboration with employers and strict insistence on the sanctity of contracts, jurisdictional division by craft, and the authority of national officials rejected by growing numbers of workers.
The celebrations of 1917 were the prelude, then, to the great strikes of 1919. Seattle workers saw in the October Revolution their own image, the embodiment of what they were fighting for at home. “No single event,” wrote Duncan, “throughout the whole world today can, from the standpoint of workers everywhere, compare in importance with the successful piloting of the Russian Soviet Republic past the treacherous rocks of international capitalist greed and the determination of these plunderers to ruin what they cannot rule.” When two thousand longshoremen, overflowing their hall, celebrated the second anniversary of the Revolution on November 7, 1919, they rose in “tremendous cheering,” as the IWW’s J. T. Doran walked from the vestibule to the rostrum and began to speak. Doran, free on bail from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, delivered, according to Magden, a rousing speech in which he described the workers’ revolution in Russia as “the most stupendous event since the fall of feudalism.”
Union City
By the end of the First World War, trade union membership in Seattle had quadrupled since 1915 to create, in effect, a closed-shop city. The General Strike would require no pickets, since there were no strikebreakers. Prejudice toward minorities eased, challenging management’s ever-ready divide-and-rule tactic. On the eve of the strike, Japanese unions appealed to the SCLC to join the strike committee and were accepted. “Even in the midst of strike excitement, let us stop for a moment to recognize the action of the Japanese barbers and restaurant workers who, through their own unions, voted to take part in the General Strike,” commented the Union Record. “The Japanese deserve the greater credit because they have been denied admission and affiliation with the rest of the labor movement and have joined the strike of their own initiative. We hope that this evidence of labor’s solidarity will have an influence on the relations between the two races in the future.” Black workers were accepted as full members of Seattle’s unions later the same year. The General Strike began with an appeal from the shipyard workers to the SCLC for support in a pay dispute following a period of wartime wage repression. There were thirty-five thousand shipyard workers in Seattle out of a total population of around three hundred thousand — fifteen thousand more in Tacoma. The industry fused together the two sectors of the local working class, the seasonal lumber and harvest workers and the city’s skilled trades, in a potent combination. Seattle had delivered more vessels to the Navy than any other port, even though its labor movement was strongly anti-war. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand workers, including many unemployed, answered the General Strike Committee’s call. For the best part of a week, they fed the people, patrolled the streets, and celebrated workers’ power as a lived reality, until the combined weight of the forces ranged against them — the police and the special constables drafted in by Seattle’s belligerent mayor, Ole Hanson; the federal troops deployed by Secretary of War Newton Baker; the big newspapers; and the national leaders of the AFL and its affiliates — broke the striking unions’ resolve.
At the outset of the hostilities, Anna Louise Strong wrote that a Seattle walkout wouldn’t in itself greatly trouble the big commercial combines in the East. “But, the closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the workers organize to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order — this will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over of power by the workers.” Stirred by the Everett case, Strong had taken a job as second-in-command at the Union Record. Probably an IWW member, she lived and worked in Socialist circles, also retaining acquaintances from her earlier life — including Russian émigrés, one a friend of Lenin’s. She organized much of the paper’s international coverage, notably a Russia department, and also wrote its editorials; as often as not she was the voice of the General Strike.
Against a remarkable backdrop of communist uprisings in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, red flags on the Clyde, and the hot summer in Turin, the Seattle strike fired the starting pistol for an extraordinary year of working-class rebellion in the States, the like of which has not been seen since: the Boston police strike; industry-wide action in steel, coal mining, and textiles. The subsequent era of working-class retreat began with the shattering of the IWW, the splintering and demise of the Socialist Party, and the employers’ counterrevolution — the American Plan. In Seattle itself, the Emergency Fleet Corporation cancelled orders for new vessels, forcing thousands of shipyard workers into redundancy, while the Waterfront Employers’ Association reintroduced the open shop. But labor radicalism didn’t die after 1919. The General Strike and IWW militancy lived on, if underground; also in the vivid recollections of old Wobblies and in the battles of young socialists in the 1930s. Along with an underlay of Scandinavian progressivism, this legacy laid the foundation for Washington’s Cooperative Commonwealth movement, which brought an alliance of CIO unions and progressive farmers to power in Olympia and elected the communist Hugh DeLacy to Congress. In governing circles, the strike wasn’t forgotten. It was in 1936 that FDR’s postmaster general, David Farley, would ironically raise a glass to “the forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington,” a phrase later popularized in the writings of Mary McCarthy.”
As I wrote in my post of September 20 2023, Our Best, Last Hope For Democracy and the Survival of Humankind: Unions As A Model Of An Ideal Society and An Instrument Of Nonviolent Seizure Of Power; In what ways will such class struggles between capital and labor define our nation, democracy, and the fate of humankind?
In this moment we test and observe enormous forces of history in the crucible of America, this absurd experiment in which one human being is as good as any other, and of equal value as an inherent quality of our humanity.
What a revolutionary notion; and possibly the origin of all true revolution.
Among the vast systems of dehumanization we must wrestle with to achieve a free society of equals, privatization and theft of the commons has unleashed a death spiral of capitalism wherein all wealth accumulates at the top embodied in a few apex predators and oligarchs in an increasingly narrow hegemonic elite of wealth, power, and privilege, as those whose labor creates that wealth and power become nearer to true slaves under forces of falsification, commodification, and theft of the soul.
This is late stage capitalism, as it reaches the point of civilizational collapse, as we are witnessing now with the hollowing out of the middle class and the emergence of a mass precariat in the shadow of plutocratic extravagance and decadence.
So for the political and social threats we now face; and all of this dovetails horrifically with civilization as war on nature which of late has in fires and floods sent us signs of our impending doom and the existential threat of a dying earth and the extinction of our species.
Yet we have ready examples at hand of different paths we may take, we human beings, and of how we may choose to be human together.
Here I am thinking of the courageous and glorious history of organized labor and of the 1919 Seattle General Strike which shaped labor unions in America, which seeks to change the relationships between capitalist and labor classes.
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/seattle-general-strike-iww-labor-revolution
Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919, Dr Cal Winslow
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48829014-radical-seattle?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_22
Labor Unions and How To Build Them, a reading list
Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, Kim Kelly
There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America,
Philip Dray
A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy,
Jane F. McAlevey
Secrets of a Successful Organizer, Alexandra Bradbury, Mark Brenner, Jane Slaughter
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29926394-secrets-of-a-successful-organizer
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, Saul D. Alinsky
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102748.Rules_for_Radicals?ref=rae_3
Class Struggle Unionism, Joe Burns
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60417739-class-struggle-unionism
Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class, Mike Davis
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7856.Prisoners_of_the_American_Dream?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_31
An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism, Kim Moody
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/926734.An_Injury_to_All?ref=rae_0
The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor,
Hamilton Nolan
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/173403905-the-hammer?ref=rae_19
Torch of Liberty 